The restaurant and food service industry is a large volume consumer of viscous condiments and ingredients that are used to prepare and/or accompany food items. Fast-food restaurants prepare hundreds of food items each day. Many of these food items require the application of some type of condiment or sauce. For example, many sandwiches that are made at fast-food type restaurants require the application of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, barbeque sauce, tartar sauce, sour cream, cheese sauce, or various combinations of these sauces, to name just a few. Often times the sauces are stored in a squeeze bottle and are applied as needed by squeezing the squeeze bottle. Other systems use a caulking-gun type dispenser in which sauce is stored in a cylinder that has a piston in the rear of the cylinder. Sauce is dispensed from the gun by pressing a trigger that moves the cylinder and causes the sauce to dispense.
These types of systems have several drawbacks. First, these can be characterized as hand-held systems in that the condiment reservoir is entirely supported by the user when these devices are used to dispense condiments. In the case of the squeeze bottle, the users must move the entire bottle to the location in which the sauce is to be dispensed (e.g., to a spot on a workstation in which a sandwich is being assembled), support the bottle, and manipulate the bottle so that it dispenses the condiment contained therein. Similarly, in the case of the gun-type dispenser, the entire gun, which includes the entire condiment reservoir, is moved, supported and manipulated by the user. Since the entire condiment reservoir must be supported by the user, the size of the reservoir is limited because if the reservoir is too large, the weight of the condiment in the reservoir will be prohibitive and can cause injury to workers that must repeatedly handle such heavy tools.
A second drawback is that since the condiment reservoirs of these devices are limited in size, the reservoirs must be replenished frequently. Their small size limits their capacity. In many applications, particularly in fast-food type restaurants, large volumes of condiments must be used everyday. Accordingly, production must be stopped frequently in order to replenish the condiment reservoirs. This is both time-consuming and labor intensive and thus makes these devices inefficient.
A third shortcoming of these devices is that the reservoir itself is a relatively expensive piece of equipment. The squeeze bottle and the cylinder of the gun-type dispenser are not considered disposable items because of their relative cost. Accordingly, when these devices exhaust their condiment reservoirs they must be refilled. The need to refill these reservoirs, as opposed to replacing the empty reservoirs with new ones that are pre-filled with condiment, further increase the inefficiency of these devices.
In addition to providing condiments and other viscous ingredients to foods in the preparation process, there are other instances where it is necessary to dispense condiments. For example, many restaurants utilize bottles of condiments that are either used by patrons at tables or used by employees during the preparation of foods. These bottles are relatively expensive and not disposable items, so they must be refilled when they are empty. Typically, these bottles are refilled from high volume packages that contain on the order of three to five gallons of condiment. These high volume packages usually are plastic bags that included fitments, much like the package described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,647,511 to Bond. In order to dispense the condiment from these packages, a separate nozzle must be inserted into the fitment.
These high volume packages have several disadvantages. First, having to include a rigid fitment into the bag greatly increases the material cost and manufacturing difficulty of the package. Second, inserting a nozzle into the fitment can be a difficult procedure that can result in spillage of condiment from the package that will need to be cleaned and can create unsanitary conditions for the dispensing of the condiment.
The present invention addresses these and other problems.